This year, DBpedia will participate for the sixth time in a row in the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC). We are regularly growing our community through GSoC and are currently looking for students who want to join us for a summer of coding. Read below for further details about GSoC and how to apply.

What is GSoC?

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Funds will be given to students (BSc, MSc, Ph.D.) to work for three months on a specific task. At first, open source organizations announce their student projects and then students should contact the mentor organizations they want to work with and write up a project proposal for the summer. After a selection phase, students are matched with a specific project and a set of mentors to work on the project during the summer.

If you are a GSoC student who wants to apply to our organization, please check our guidelines before you start drafting your project proposal.

This year GSoC timeline is as follows:

March 12th, 2018

Student applications open (Students can register and submit their applications to mentor organizations.)

April 9th, 2018

Student application deadline

April 23rd, 2018

Accepted students are announced and paired with a mentor. Bonding period begins.

May 14h, 2018

Coding officially begins!

August 6th, 2018

Final week: Students submit their final work product and their final mentor evaluation

August 22nd, 2018

Final results of Google Summer of Code 2017 announced

Check our website, follow us on #twitter or subscribe to our newsletter for further updates.

DBpedia is part of a large network of industry and academia, companies, and organizations as well as 20 Universities including student members. Our aim is to qualify aspiring developers and knowledge graph enthusiasts by working together with industry partners on DBpedia-related tasks. The final goal is, that DBpedia can be effectively integrated into organizations and businesses and incubate their knowledge graph to the next level. We intend to foster collaboration between DBpedia and organizations sharing an interest in and want to profit from Open-Knowledge-Graph governance.

gain insight into your needs helping us to shape our strategy for the future.

Springer Nature was the first partner we collaborated with, in of our new program. We set out on an endeavor tointerlink Springer Nature’s SciGraph and DBpedia datasets.

With Beyza Yaman, who managed to prevail against 7 other international competitors, we found the perfect partner in crime to tackle this challenge. Read her interview below and find out more about the internship.

Who are you?

My name is Beyza Yaman and I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DIBRIS) at University of Genoa (Italy). I am working on the problem of source selection on Linked Open Data for live queries proposing a context and quality dependent solution. Beside my studies, I like to meet new people, learn their cultures and discover new places, especially by walking/hiking events.

Why DBpedia? What is your main interest in DBpedia and what was your motivation to apply for our collaborative internship?

I have already been using DBpedia datasets for my experiments. Besides from being the core of the Linked Data Cloud, DBpedia is one of the platforms which brings the applied semantic technologies forward and ahead of most other data technologies. Also, collaboration with Springer Nature which is one of the best publishing companies was the cherry on the cake! Springer is an innovative company which applies the latest technologies to their requirements. Thus, being involved in a project with different grounds seemed to be a fruitful experience. When I saw the announcement of the internship, I thought this is a great opportunity not to be missed!

As the web of data is growing into the interlinked data space, data sources should be connected to discover further insight from the data by creating meaningful relations. Moreover, further information (e.g. quality) about these link sets forms another aspect of the Semantic Web objectives. Thus, we worked on interlinking SciGraph and DBpedia datasets by using the Link Discovery approach for the structured content and the Named Entity Recognition approach for unstructured text. We were able to integrate SciGraph data with DBpedia resources which improves the identity resolution in the existing resources and to enrich the SciGraph data with additional relations by annotating SciGraph content with DBpedia links which increases the discoverability of the data. One of the challenges we faced was having a huge amount of data and, actually, we have produced even more for the Linked Data users. You can follow our work, use the data and give us feedback from this repository (https://github.com/dbpedia/sci-graph-links).

What did you learn from the project?

It has been a fantastic experience which helped me to expand my theoretical knowledge with a lot of practical aspects. I worked with Markus Freudenberg from DBpedia and Tony Hammond, Michele Pasin and Evangelos Theodoridis from Springer Nature. Working with technically well-equipped researchers and professionals on the subject has been very influential for my research. Especially, working with a team of academics and professionals in collaboration has taught me two different views of looking at the project. I learned more about SciGraph data and DBpedia, as well as, many ways of dealing with huge amount of data, tools used in DBpedia and Linked Data environment, the importance of open source data/codes. Besides the project, I had a chance to witness development phases of DBpedia in the Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT) group (Leipzig) with a bunch of cool guys and girls who made my stay more enjoyable. I also met a lot of researchers with Semantic Web experience which has extended my point of view widely.

What are your next plans? How do you want to contribute to DBpedia in the future?

I would like to finish my Ph.D. and extend my knowledge by involving new exciting projects like this one. Publishing what we have done and further quality improvements might be a nice follow up for the work and Linked Data community. Besides, I would like to contribute to the development of the Turkish DBpedia Chapter which is unfortunately missing. Thus, in this way, we can promote the usage and development of DBpedia and Linked Data to the Turkish research community and companies as well.

There will also be a report on the collaboration between Springer Nature and DBpedia that will cover the technical details of linking DBpedia and SciGraph datasets. We will keep you informed about news via Twitter and our Website.

We are really happy to have worked with her and we are now looking forward to a Turkish DBpedia Chapter. If you are a DBpedia enthusiast and want to help to start the Turkish DBpedia chapter, just get in touch with Beyza or contact us.

Did her story inspire you? Do you want to become an intern at DBpedia? Check our Website, Twitter, and Social Media and don’t miss any internship updates.

Last but not least, we like to thank Springer Nature for their cooperation and commitment to the project.

In case you like to collaborate with us in order to find a developer that helps to integrate DBpedia into your business get in touch with us via dbpedia@infai.org.

Just recently, DBpedia Association member and hosting specialist, OpenLink released the DBpedia Usage report, a periodic report on the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint and associated Linked Data deployment.

The report not only gives some historical insight into DBpedia’s usage, number of visits and hits per day but especially shows statistics collected between October 2016 and December 2017. The report covers more than a year of logs from the DBpedia web service operated by OpenLink Software at http://dbpedia.org/sparql/.

Before we want to highlight a few aspects of DBpedia’s usage we would like to thank Open Link for the continuous hosting of the DBpedia Endpoint and the creation of this report

The graph shows the average number of hits/requests per day that were made to the DBpedia service during each of the releases.The graph shows the average number of unique visits per day made to the DBpedia service during each of the datasets.

Speaking of which, as you can see in the following tables, there has been a massive increase in the number of hits coinciding with the DBpedia 2015–10 release on April 1st, 2016.

This boost can be attributed to an intensive promotion of DBpedia via community meetings, communication with various partners in the Linked Data community and Social media presence among the community, in order to increase backlinks.

Since then, not only the numbers of hits increased but DBpedia also provided for better data quality. We are constantly working on improving accessibility, data quality and stability of the SPARQL endpoint. Kudos to Open Link for maintaining the technical baseline for DBpedia.

Can you believe ..?

… that it has already been eleven years since the first DBpedia dataset was released? Eleven years of development, improvements and growth, and now, 13 billion pieces of information are comprised in our last DBpedia release. We want to take this opportunity to send out a big thank you to all contributors, developers, coders, hosters, funders, believers and DBpedia enthusiasts who made that possible. Thank you for your support.

But, apart from our data sets, there is much more DBpedia has been doing., especially during the past year. Think about the success story of Wouter Maroy, a GSoC 2016 student who got the opportunity to do a six weeks internship at our DBpedia office in Leipzig and who is still contributing to DBpedia’s progress.

All in all, 2017 was highly successful and full of exciting events. Remember our 10th DBpedia Community Meeting in Amsterdam featuring an inspiring keynote by Dr. Chris Welty, one of the developers at IBM computer Watson. Our DBpedia meetings are always a great way to bring the community closer together, and to not only meet our DBpedia audience but also new faces. Therefore, we have already started to plan our community meetings for 2018.

We hope to see you in Poznan, Poland, in spring and to meet you during the SEMANTiCS Conference in Vienna, from 10th – 13th of September 2018. Additionally, if everything goes according to plan, we will be mentoring young DBpedia enthusiasts throughout summer in GSoC 2018 and meet the US DBpedia community in autumn this year. Follow us on Twitter or check our Website for the latest News.

And last but not least, this year we plan something special. DBpedia intends to participate in Coding DaVinci – Germany’s first open cultural hackathon, which happens to take place in Leipzig, right around the corner. Aspiring data enthusiast will develop new creative applications from cultural open data. The kick-off is in early April, followed by 9 weeks of cooperative coding. We are eagerly awaiting the start of this event.

We do hope, we will meet you and some new faces during our events this year. The DBpedia Association want to get to know you because DBpedia is a community effort and would not continue to develop, improve and grow without you. Thank you and see you soon…

One lightning event after the other. Just four weeks after our Amsterdam Community Meeting, we crossed the Atlantic for the third time to meet with over 110 US-based DBpedia enthusiasts. This time, the DBpedia Community met in Cupertino, California and was hosted at Apple Inc.

Main Event

First and foremost, we would like to thank Apple for the warm welcome and the hosting of the event.

After a Meet & Greet with refreshments, Taylor Rhyne, Eng. Product Manager at Apple, and Pablo N. Mendes, Researcher at Apple and chair of the DBpedia Community Committee, opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the following 2 hours.

The main event attracted attendees with eleven invited talks from major companies of the Bay Area actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general such as Diffbot, IBM, Wikimedia, NTENT, Nuance, Volley and Stardog Union.

Tommaso Soru – University of Leipzig

Tommaso Soru (University of Leipzig), DBpedia mentor in our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, opened the invited talks session with the updates from the DBpedia developer community. This year, DBpedia participated in the GSoC 2017 program with 7 different projects including “First Chatbot for DBpedia”, which was selected as Best DBpedia GSoC Project 2017. His presentation is available here.

DBpedia likes to thank the following poeple for organizinga nd hosting our Community Meeting in Cupertino, California.

Invited Talks- A Short Recap

Filipe Mesquita (Diffbot) introduced the new DBpedia NLP Department, born from a recent partnership between our organization and the California based company, which aims at creating the most accurate and comprehensive database of human knowledge. His presentation is available here. Dan Gruhl (IBM Research) held a presentation about the in-house development of an omnilingual ontology and how DBpedia data supported this

Filipe Mesquita – Diffbot

endeavor. Stas Malyshev representative for Dario Taraborelli (both Wikimedia Foundation) presented the current state of the structured data initiatives at Wikidata and the query capabilities for Wikidata. Their slides are available here and here. Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT) gave a short talk on mobile semantic search.

The second part of the event saw Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Nuance) holding a presentation with the title “DBpedia from the Fringe” giving some insights on how DBpedia could be further improved. Shortly after, Sebastian Hellmann, Executive Director of the DBpedia Association, walked the stage and presented the state of the art of the association, including achievements and future goals. Sanjay Krishnan (U.C. Berkeley) talked about the link between AlphaGo and data cleansing. You can find his slides here. Bill Andersen (Volley.com) argued for the use of extremely precise and fine-grained approaches to deal with small data. His presentation is available here. Finally, Michael Grove (Stardog Union) stressed on the view of knowledge graphs as knowledge toolkits backed by a graph data model.

Michael Grove – Stardog Union

The event concluded with refreshments, snacks and drinks served in the atrium allowing to talk about the presented topics, discuss the latest developments in the field of knowledge graphs and network between all participants. In the end, this closing session was way longer than had been planned.

GSoC Mentor Summit

Shortly after the CA Community Meeting, our DBpedia mentors Tommaso Soru and Magnus Knuth participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held in Sunnyvale California. During free sessions hosted by mentors of diverse open source organizations, Tommaso and Magnus presented selected projects during their lightning talks. Beyond open source, open data topics have been targeted in multiple sessions, as this is not only relevant for research, but there is also a strong need in software projects. The meetings paved the way for new collaborations in various areas, e.g. the field of question answering over the DBpedia knowledge corpus, in particular the use of Neural SPARQL Machines for the translation of natural language into structured queries. We expect that this hot deep-learning topic will be featured in the next edition of GSoC projects. Overall, it has been a great experience to meet so many open source fellows from all over the world.

Upcoming events

After the event is before another ….

Connected Data London, November 16th, 2017.

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association will present Data Quality and Data Usage in a large-scale Multilingual Knowledge Graph during the content track at the Connected Data in London. He will also join the panelists in the late afternoon panel discussionabout Linked Open Data: Is it failing or just getting out of the blocks? Feel free to join the event and support DBpedia.

A message for all DBpedia enthusiasts – our next Community Meeting

Currently we are planning our next Community Meeting and would like to invite DBpedia enthusiasts and chapters who like to host a meeting to send us their ideas to dbpedia@infai.org. The meeting is scheduled for the beginning of 2018. Any suggestions regarding place, time, program and topics are welcome!

Only 8 days left to reserve your seat for our 3rd US DBpedia Community Meeting. We are happy to announce that the 11th DBpedia Meeting will be held in Cupertino, California on October 12th 2017, hosted by Apple Inc.

After the success of the last two community meetings in Sunnyvale and in Galway, we thought it is time to go Orange again. During the SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam, Sep 11-14, the DBpedia Community met on the 14th of September. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community and many thanks to the Meervaart Theatre and the SEMANTiCS for hosting our community meeting.

picture by Andrea Volpini

Opening Session

Chris Welty

During the opening session, Chris Welty, Google Researcher, presented Even the Changes Are Changing: A New Age of Cognitive Computing. He introduced the impact and challenges of question answering & AI as well as the development of Jeopardy through technical changes. Victor de Boer from the VU University talked about Semantic Technology for Development: Semantic Web without the Web?. He demonstrated the use of semantic technology in the challenging technical environment of developing countries. Both talks illustrated the ever growing importance of semantic technology and AI each placed at opposite sites of the technology spectrum, from Raspberry PIs to High Performance Clusters.

Showcase Session

The DBpedia Showcase Session started with an interactive interview. Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) talked with Jan-Bart de Vreede (Kennisnet, former member of the Wikimedia Foundation) about the challenges of growing an open community and creating a more formal structure. They discussed advantages, pitfalls and what lessons can be learned from other communities such as Wikimedia. Afterwards Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT) introduced the highlights of the 2016-10 DBpedia Release.

At this session, five speakers presented how to utilize DBpedia in novel and interesting ways. Including:

As a regular part of the DBpedia Community Meeting, we had two parallel sessions in the afternoon where DBpedia newbies can learn about what DBpedia is and how to use the DBpedia datasets. Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the tutorial session by Markus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). The DBpedia Association Hour provided a platform for the community to discuss the results of the DBpedia Strategy Survey 2017. This survey was prepared by Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board members to get to know what the DBpedia Community thinks about DBpedia’s strategic priorities and how the funds of the DBpedia Association should be spent. Even if 45 minutes were not adequate to review all survey questions, this session proved to be beneficial due to a really agile and dynamic discussion. A better cooperation and communication between the Association and the different national and language chapter is only one suitable key which was embraced by the community to facilitate problem solving and DBpedia’s organization.

Afternoon Track

The sessions in the afternoon highlighted two important fields of research and development, namely DBpedia Ontology and DBpedia & NLP. At the DBpedia Ontology Session, Gustavo Publio (AKSW/KILT) presented data quality issues in DBpedia and highlighted the challenges on redesign the DBpedia Ontology (slides). Wouter Maroy (imec) and Ismael Rodríguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) showcased the DBpedia Mappings Front-End Administration, which they created during this year’s Google Summer of Code project. If you are interested in career opportunities at DBpedia, check out Wouter’s success story here.

Gustavo Publio

At the same time, Milan Dojchinovski (AKSW/KILT) chaired the DBpedia & NLP session with five very interesting talks. In the following you will find all presentations given during this session:

Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands) chaired the Dutch DBpedia Hour. In this open session members of the Dutch DBpedia Language Chapter discussed tasks and responsibilities for sustaining and developing the Dutch DBpedia as well as communication, technical infrastructure and content improvement of the DBpedia Dutch Language Chapter. The reference for this discussion was the tasks and responsibilities stated in the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Huygens ING, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, iMec and Beeld en Geluid. Outcome of this session was an agreement on the approach for creating an operational plan.

Simultaneously, DBpedia joint a session with the Workshop “Linked Data Quality Assessment and Improvement from Academia to Industry”. The presentations are available below:

In the closing session, Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) announced a new collaboration to strengthen the DBpedia NLP Department. Via videostream we talked with Mike Tung and Filipe Mesquita from diffbot, about NLP and the relation extraction from Wikipedia articles. If you are interested in the new collaboration, please check diffbot’s slides here.

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaAmsterdam17.

We are very pleased to announce that all of this year’s Google Summer of Code students made it successful through the program and passed their projects. All codes have been submitted, merged and are ready to be examined by the rest of the world.

Marco Fossati, Dimitris Kontokostas, Tommaso Soru, Domenico Potena, Emanuele Storti , anastasia Dimiou, Wouter Maroy, Peng Xu, Sandro Coelho and Ricardo Usbeck, members of the DBpedia Community, did a great job in mentoring 7 students from around the world.All of the students enjoyed the experiences made during the program and will hopefully continue to contribute to DBpedia in the future.

“GSoC is the perfect opportunity to learn from experts, get to know new communities, design principles and work flows.” (Ram G Athreya)”

Now, we would like to take that opportunity to give you a little recap of the projects mentored by DBpedia members during the past months. Just click below for more details .

The goal of the project was to create a front-end application that provides a user-friendly interface so the DBPedia community can easily view, create and administrate DBpedia mapping rules using RML. The developed system includes user administration features, help posts, Github mappings synchronization, and rich RML related features such as syntax highlighting, RML code generation from templates, RML validation, extraction and statistics. Part of these features are possible thanks to the interaction with the DBPedia Extraction Framework. In the end, all the functionalities and goals that were required have been developed, with many functional tests and the approval of the DBpedia community. The system is ready for production deployment. For further information, please visit the project blog. Mentors: Anastasia Dimou and Wouter Maroy (Ghent University), Dimitris Kontokostas (GeoPhy HQ).

DBpedia Chatbot is a conversational chatbot for DBpedia which is accessible through the following platforms: a Web Interface, Slack and Facebook Messenger.

The bot is capable of responding to users in the form of simple short text messages or through more elaborate interactive messages. Users can communicate or respond to the bot through text and also through interactions (such as clicking on buttons/links). The bot tries to answer text based questions of the following types: natural language questions, location information, service checks, language chapters, templates and banter. For more information, please follow the link to the project site.Mentor: Ricardo Usbeck (AKSW).

Knowledge base embeddings has been an active area of research. In recent years a lot of research work such as TransE, TransR, RESCAL, SSP, etc. has been done to get knowledge base embeddings. However none of these approaches have used DBpedia to validate their approach. In this project, I want to achieve the following tasks: i) Run the existing techniques for KB embeddings for standard datasets. ii) Create an equivalent standard dataset from DBpedia for evaluations. iii) Evaluate across domains. iv) Compare and Analyse the performance and consistency of various approaches for DBpedia dataset along with other standard datasets. v) Report any challenges that may come across implementing the approaches for DBpedia. For more information, please follow the links to her project blog and GitHub-repository.Mentors: Tommaso Soru (AKSW) and Sandro Coelho (KILT).

The project defined embeddings to represent classes, instances and properties by implementing Random Vector Accumulators with additional features in order to better encode the semantic information held by the Wikipedia corpus and DBpedia graphs. To test the quality of embeddings generated by the RVA, lexical memory vectors of locations were generated and tested on a modified subset of the Google Analogies Test Set. Check out further information via Akshay’s GitHub-repo. Mentors: Tommaso Soru (AKSW) and Xu Peng (University of Alberta).

Wikipedia is full of data hidden in tables. The aim of this project was to explore the possibilities of exploiting all the data represented with the appearance of tables in Wiki pages, in order to populate the different chapters of DBpedia through new data of interest. The Table Extractor has to be the engine of this data “revolution”: it would achieve the final purpose of extracting the semi structured data from all those tables now scattered in most of the Wiki pages. In this page you can observe dataset (english and italian) extracted using table extractor . Furthermore you can read log file created in order to see all operations made up for creating RDF triples. I recommend to also see this page, that contains the idea behind the project and an example of result extracted from log files and .ttl dataset. For more details see Luca’s Git-Hub repository.Mentors: Domenico Potena and Emanuele Storti (Università Politecnica delle Marche).

Wikipedia represents a comprehensive cross-domain source of knowledge with millions of contributors. The DBpedia project tries to extract structured information from Wikipedia and transform it into RDF.

The main classification system of DBpedia depends on human curation, which causes it to lack coverage, resulting in a large amount of untyped resources. DBTax provides an unsupervised approach that automatically learns a taxonomy from the Wikipedia category system and extensively assigns types to DBpedia entities, through the combination of several NLP and interdisciplinary techniques. It provides a robust backbone for DBpedia knowledge and has the benefit of being easy to understand for end users. details about his work and his code can e found on the projects site. Mentors: Marco Fossati (Università degli Studi di Trento) and Dimitris Kontokostas (GeoPhy HQ).

This project aimed to augment upon the already existing list-extractor project by Federica in GSoC 2016. The project focused on the extraction of relevant but hidden data which lies inside lists in Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia, being the world’s largest encyclopedia, has humongous amount of information present in form of text. While key facts and figures are encapsulated in the resource’s infobox, and some detailed statistics are present in the form of tables, but there’s also a lot of data present in form of lists which are quite unstructured and hence its difficult to form into a semantic relationship. The main objective of the project was to create a tool that can extract information from Wikipedia lists and form appropriate RDF triplets that can be inserted in the DBpedia dataset. Fore details on the code and about the project check Krishanu’s blog and GitHub-repository.Mentors: Marco Fossati (Università degli Studi di Trento), Domenico Potena and Emanuele Storti (Università Politecnica delle Marche). [/expander_maker]

We are regularly growing our community through GSoC and can deliver more and more opportunities to you. Ideas and applications for the next edition of GSoC are very much welcome. Just contact us via email or check our website for details.

Again, DBpedia is planning to be a vital part of the GSoC Mentor Summit, from October 13th -15th, at the Google Campus in Sunnyvale California. This summit is a way to say thank you to the mentors for the great job they did during the program. Moreover it is a platform to discuss what can be done to improve GSoC and how to keep students involved in their communities post-GSoC.

And there is more good news to tell. DBpedia wants to meet up with the US community during the 11th DBpedia Community Meeting in California. We are currently working on the program and keep you posted as soon as registration is open.

DBpedia-Entity is a standard test collection for entity search over the DBpedia knowledge base. It is meant for evaluating retrieval systems that return a ranked list of entities (DBpedia URIs) in response to a free text user query.

Google summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development.

During the 3 months summer break from university, students work on a programming projects with an open source organization, like DBpedia.

We are part of this exciting program for more than 5 years now. Many exciting projectsdeveloped as results of intense coding during hot summers. Presenting you Wouter Maroy, who has been a GSoC student at GSoc 2016 and who is currently a mentor in this years program, we like to give you a glimpse behind the scenes and show you how important the program is to DBpedia.

Success Story: Wouter Maroy

Who are you?

I’m Wouter Maroy, a 23 years old Master’s student in Computer Science Engineering at Ghent University (Belgium). I’m affiliated with IDLab – imec. Linked Data and Big Data technologies are my two favorite fields of interest. Besides my passion for Computer Science, I like to travel, explore and look for adventures. I’m a student who enjoys his student life in Ghent.

What is your main interest in DBpedia and what was your motivation to apply for a DBpedia project at GSoC 2016.

I took courses during my Bachelors with lectures about Linked Data and the Semantic Web which of course included DBpedia; it’s an interesting research field. Before my GSoC 2016 application I did some work on Semantic Web technologies and on a technology (RML) that was required for a GSoC 2016 project that was listed by DBpedia. I wanted to get involved in Open Source and DBpedia, so I applied.

What did you do?

DBpedia has used a custom mapping language up until now to generate structured data from raw data from Wikipedia infoboxes. A next step was to improve this process to a more modular and generic approach that leads to higher quality linked data generation . This new approach relied on the integration of RML, the RDF Mapping Language and was the goal of the GSoC 2016 project I applied for. Understanding all the necessary details about the GSoC project required some effort and research before I started with coding. I also had to learn a new programming language (Scala). I had good assistance from my mentors so this turned out very well in the end. DBpedia’s Extraction Framework, which is used for extracting structured data from Wikipedia, has a quite large codebase. It was the first project of this size I was involved in. I learned a lot from reading its codebase and from contributing by writing code during these months.

Dimitris Kontokostas and Anastasia Dimou were my two mentors. They guided me well throughout the project. I interacted daily with them through Slack and each week we had a conference call to discuss the project. After many months of research, coding and discussing we managed to deliver a working prototype at the end of the project. The work we did was presented in Leipzig on the DBpedia day during SEMANTICS 16’. Additionally, this work will also be presented at ISWC 2017.

How do you currently contribute to improve DBpedia?

I’m mentoring a GSoC17 project together with Dimitris Kontokostas and Anastasia Dimou as a follow up on the work that was done by our GSoC 2016 project last year. Ismael Rodriguez is the new student who is participating in the project and he already delivered great work! Besides being a mentor for GSoC 2017, I make sure that the integration of RML into DBpedia is going into the right direction in general (managing, coding,…). For this reason, I worked at the KILT/DBpedia office in Leipzig during summer for 6 weeks. Joining and getting to know the team was a great experience.

What did you gain from the project?

Throughout the project I practiced coding, working in a team, … I learned more about DBpedia, RML, Linked Data and other related technologies. I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn this much from the project. I would recommend it to all students who are curious about DBpedia, who are eager to learn and who want to earn a stipend during summer through coding. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll have a good time!

Final words to future GSoC applicants for DBpedia projects.

Give it a shot! Really, it’s a lot of fun! Coding for DBpedia through GSoC is a great, unique experience and one who is enthusiastic about coding and the DBpedia project should definitely go for it.